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Technology Research 2013

March 06, 2013 by Bernard François

Time for some research! Peter Timmerman, Master degree student in Applied Engineering – Computer Science at University College Ghent, joined us a few weeks ago for his internship and thesis on a range of technologies applicable to game prototyping and game development.

Here are some of the things Peter will have a closer look at:

  • Fast development of race games: We’re anxious to find out more on quickly generating race tracks on the fly!
  • Using sound files as input: For instance to be used in a basic lip sync algorithm, or perhaps to generate a level based on a sound file?
  • Real-time multiplayer: Peter will have a look at SmartFoxS and Exit Games’ Photon Server.
  • Adobe Flash animations in Unity3D: We’ve already tested Iggy (see earlier article), so uniSWF and/or Autodesk Scaleform will be next. At least… if we can get our hands on trial versions.
  • Location based gameplay: Using the iPhone’s GPS and compass, we’ll create a small location based game, perhaps combined with augmented reality.
  • OpenNI: Building upon PreviewLabs’ experience prototyping for the Kinect SDK, Peter will create a playable game prototype using the OpenNI SDK and share it with the community.
  • Smart TVs: The platform of the future? Could be. Eager to learn something about game development on a Samsung Smart TV!
  • Recreating a smartphone’s 3D path: We’ll see how far we get in reconstructing the 3D trajectory of a moving smartphone, solely based on accelerometer and gyroscope data.
  • Gameplay possibilities of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI): We’ll use the NeuroSky MindWave to learn more about how measuring your brainwaves could affect gameplay.
  • Dual screen gameplay: Interested by the gameplay possibilities of recent Wii U and Xbox Smartglass products, we’ll see if there’s an easy way to prototype gameplay using two screens in Unity3D.

In the coming weeks we’ll be making a blogpost for each technology we’ve researched, so stay tuned!

Posted in Internships, Prototypes, Research, Technology, Unity3D | 1 Comment

Game Connection Europe 2012

November 28, 2012 by Bernard François

PreviewLabs is currently present at Game Connection 2012 in Paris. Just like last time we went in 2010, we’re aiming to expand our network by meeting new people and companies in the industry. This time featuring a bigger portfolio: over 45 projects done in the first three years of our existence!

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During the event, I’ll be taking some pictures now and then, and sharing them on our Facebook page.

Posted in Business | Leave a comment

Using Iggy for Flash Animation in Unity3D

November 02, 2012 by Peter Timmerman

Recently, we have been looking into technologies that allow integration of animations made in Flash in Unity3D prototypes and games. This seems to be very useful to create complex 2D animations in Flash, and simply play them in Unity.

There are a several solutions on the market for this, like AutoDesk’s Scaleform, UniSWF and Rad Game Tools’ Iggy. Since I wasn’t able to obtain a trial version of both Scaleform (which wasn’t yet released for Unity) and UniSWF (whose support didn’t answer to our email), I have examined Iggy in more detail.

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We were quite surprised to see that Iggy gives you the freedom to program parts of your game either in Unity, or in Flash itself, using ActionScript 3. For instance, you could write a lot of actionscript code for the animation and simply dispatch input events like a key press through Iggy to the actionscript. Alternatively, you could limit the code in Flash as much as possible, and control everything from within Unity.

This sounds quite powerful, but unfortunately the process required to integrate it in a project can’t really be called user friendly. It seems that this still requires a lot of code that could as well have been hidden from the programmer’s eyes. Also on the stability side of the product, there’s still some work for Rad Game Tools – Unity crashed now and then while playing Flash animations.

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Iggy is still relatively new and still has some issues, but it’s certainly something to look out for. I may have a second look at it again in a few months from now, and also evaluate Scaleform and UniSWF if possible.

Posted in 2D, Internships, Programming, Research, Technology, Unity3D | 2 Comments

Panic! Announced for PlayStation Mobile

September 20, 2012 by Bernard François

Panic!, a game by Thumbs Up has been announced by Ripstone as one of the launch titles for Sony’s forthcoming PlayStation Mobile platform, and we’re proud we have developed the prototype for the game!

As mentioned on Ripstone’s website:

Panic! is a top-down action puzzler for PlayStation Mobile that requires quick thinking and fast reflexes. A giant alien slime monster is attacking the city! What can you do? Help a few survivors escape the city by creating blockades. Topple houses, drop bombs and throw buoys to save those about to be swallowed by the slime!

The concept for Panic! was one of several game concepts conceived during brainstorm sessions with our team and Nicolas Marinus, Managing Director at Thumbs Up.
The prototype for the game was part of a series of prototypes that have been mentioned on the projects section of our website since more than a year, and carried the working title ‘Guide The Flood’.

Since the gamescom event of 2011, Nicolas used the prototype for pitching purposes (as can be read in this customer testimonial), and later started working with Green Hill to accelerate the pitching process.

Screenshots of the prototype and game will follow soon.

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Concept art for Panic!, by Stroke Studios

Posted in Prototypes | 2 Comments

PreviewLabs Hires Again: Game Prototyping Programmer

August 06, 2012 by Bernard François

We’re looking for a Game Prototyping Programmer to join our team in Ghent, Belgium.

The person we’re looking for will be responsible for the development of a number of prototypes, from start to end. At the same time, he or she will contribute to assessing and evaluating the concepts.

It’s a full-time position with a 3 month contract, which will be likely to be extended.

More information on this position can be found in the following job description.

Applicants can get in touch trough our contact form.

Note: The position has been filled – welcome to the team, Stijn!

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Unity 4 Announced

June 20, 2012 by Bernard François

Unity Technologies announced the next big release of their game engine earlier this week: Unity 4. This was quite a surprise to me, since they’ve only launched their previous big release, Unity 3.5, in March at the Game Developers Conference.

The main features that they’re adding in this release include an advanced character animation tool, and improved graphics (advanced shadows for mobile devices, and DirectX 11 rendering for PC games), and support for the Linux operating system.

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Most of the announced features are particularly useful for the development of higher quality full games, but for rapid prototyping we have to look at the smaller features.

Among the announced features, these are the two features of which we believe that they could interesting for rapid prototyping:

  • Major optimisations in UnityGUI performance and memory usage: This would also allow us to prototype more complex 2D games faster on the mobile platform, hopefully entirely removing the need to use sprite manager systems for prototyping purposes, as described in this earlier blog post.
  • Dynamic fonts on all platforms with HTML-like markup: This could allow us to prototype UIs faster.
  • The profiler feature will also work on mobile: This will make it faster to find performance bottlenecks – even though this would only be available for certain Android devices, perhaps they’ll extend it to iOS in the future. And profiling on Android could help detecting performance issues that are present on iOS as well.

The release date hasn’t been announced yet, and I suspect that there may be several smaller workflow improvements that make it more convenient to work with Unity.

Posted in Technology, Unity3D | 2 Comments

ActiveCollab 3.0 Timer Issue: Resolved

May 24, 2012 by Bernard François

With the recent growth of the company, we’re now focusing on improving the scaleability of our team – to allow further growth. As a part of this effort, we’ve been trying out several solutions for time tracking and project management.

Currently, we’re doing a trial with ActiveCollab, a web based project management solution, which allows sharing specific pieces of information (such as a prototype estimation breakdown) in an elegant manner.

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In combination with ActiveCollab, we’ve been using the ActiveCollab Timer application, to allow us to continue tracking time, even when the Internet connection or ActiveCollab hosting would be down.

Due to an automatic upgrade to ActiveCollab 3.0, which happened yesterday evening, the Timer application ceased working, and some timer entries were stick in the sending queue (not visible any more in the application, nor sent and stored in the web based system). After contacting ActiveCollab Support, it seemed that there would be no way to recover the lost data.

Luckily, we’ve found that you can read this data from a file on your disk.

This is what you need to do in case you’d need to recover this lost data:

  • Download SQLite Database Browser.
  • Use it to open the file activeCollabTimer.db in the ~/Library/Application Support/A51/activeCollabTimer directory (Windows users can search for the activeCollabTimer.db file to locate it).
  • You’ll see that the data you’re looking for is stored in the actimesubmit_time column of the actimesubmit table (as it can be seen in the screenshot).

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Posted in Business, Technology | Leave a comment

The Festival of Games 2012

April 16, 2012 by Bernard François

For the third time in a row, we’ll be attending the Festival of Games event in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

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The #FoG12 is a small game industry event, were the key players of the Dutch games industry can be met, as well as companies from other countries interested in meeting these players (such as ourselves – PreviewLabs).

There’s also a conference part to it – this time appealingly called the Creative Spirit Game Conference 2012, but I’m mainly attending for the networking opportunities.

If you’re attending the Festival of Games as well, and would like to learn more about what PreviewLabs is doing, please don’t hesitate and get in touch through our contact form!

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Status Update

April 13, 2012 by Bernard François

It’s been an extremely busy time lately, so I decided to give a quick bullet-point-style status update on PreviewLabs’ activity since the previous blog post:

  • We delivered our first Unity3D + Kinect prototype for Yale University a few weeks ago. More specifically, this was developed for the Yale Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine. The prototype is currently being used for research purposes.
  • Last month, I attended the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. This was a great occasion to meet some of the customers we’ve worked for before in real life for the very first time, and also to make new connections. Together with Kinection, we even used this unique occasion to work on some ongoing projects together for a few hours.
  • We’ve been brainstorming for Cartamundi – the world leader in playing cards – and developed a prototype for them showing off Printechnologic’s TouchCode API in combination with cards printed by Cartamundi. The prototype shows how this technology can enhance the gameplay.
  • The books of the Unity Essentials Books Giveaway found their way to their new owners. Enjoy!
  • After all the work done for Kinection, it’s no surprise that there would be more educational game prototyping projects coming up. The first one has been delivered just a week ago, for a client in Belgium. I’m starting to see more and more signs indicating that the market for serious games for educational purposes, used in schools, is something that will really kick of in the next years.
  • We’ve worked for our first customer in Hong Kong! And that’s pretty much all that can be disclosed about it at the moment…
Posted in Business | Leave a comment

Unity Essentials Books Giveaway

February 07, 2012 by Bernard François

Together with Packt Publishing, we’re giving away a couple of books on Unity3D!

Six of our readers will get either Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials or Unity iOS Essentials.

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Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials seems to be aimed at users new to Unity3D and gives quite a complete tour of the game engine – covering beginner’s topics like 3D game development basics and user interfaces, but also more advanced topics as ray-casting and optimization.

One of the main differences when developing for iOS, compared to PC or Mac, is that you have to be more careful when it comes to performance. The author of the other book, Unity iOS Essentials, is clearly aware of this, as the readers already get their hands dirty in the the second chapter called iOS Performance Guide.

All you have to do to make a chance to win one of the books is to add a comment to this post, letting us know which one of the two books you’d like to win, and what topics you’d like to read more about in it.

An overview of the topics covered in the books can be found here and here (under the ‘Table of Contents’ tab).

Winners will be selected at random. Winners from the U.S. and Europe can either choose to receive a physical copy of the book or the eBook. Winners from other locales are limited to the eBook only. The contest will close on the 14th of February, and the winners will be contacted by email the day after – so be sure to use your real email address when you comment!

Posted in Unity3D | 57 Comments
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